Grief in the Nursery

I do beleive that all education, in the tradition of currare, is elegaic.  It is an always "becoming" and so must mourn, in a somewhat (but not entirely) Derridean sense, the past, the present, certainly, knowlege and the hopeful space of the ineffable.  But there is a different chapter I must write someday soon and it is that of the Grief of education.  In particular, the grief of early childhood care and education.  The last of the childhood territories to be colonized (with infancy's raw, uterine tissue being cognitized and marketed even in the moment)--it is worthy of a ululation, a Ginsbergian HOWL. Early Childhood teachers are nearly mad with the denial of this greif but they are a strong set and persevere like every colonized first peoples--Fanon will explain, I need not.  Like a woman in labor, they cannot interrupt their work because it will kill them to do so.  (Those of us who have stepped back from the work feel as if we might be dying, indeed.  But we are hoping to shift to midwife and doula.) 

The commodification of babies represent a trespass akin to rape.  It is perhaps no coincidence that, as I attempt to write my own step toward midwifery, I must remember anew, understand with a compassion I had not allowed before, my own rape as a young woman.  Several, in fact. At some level this is the truth I can speak to my own pyschic journey and to the colonization of the psychic space of early childhood:  Rape is rape. I suspect the hysteria 20+ years ago around molestation and abuse in day cares foretold our psychic knowledge--we knew our babies were being abused; we just didn't want to acknowledge that we were complicit. Violation of our being at this unique level--violating our youngest in the name of material avarice and fear--is akin to the much-discussed rape of the environment (no mistake in that conflation). Strong feminist voices from Mary Daly, to Carolyn Merchant to Susan Griffen to Riane Eisler have consistently pointed out the link between the oppression of the "feminine" and the despoiling of our planet. A deep, raw wound exists here--and the pledge to further enshrine this violation by "husbanding, stewarding" or any of the other euphemisms for consolidating and attemping to bury the sin only make this relationship all the more clear. 

This goes further to what Wittgenstein was asking for, I think, when he tried to point to the limits of language: We can only language the moment and to language beyond that, to totalize it into a system of surety, betrays the possible, forecloses the open hope of time, embodiment, instantiation ever becoming.  Of course, we must speak into the moment, but to demand the baby utter Truth is to lock our very being into a hubris that will betray our possibilites.  Colonizing the newly born forecloses upon life-force.  We have rooted through our psychic spaces and found the last, now--the womb. And the law is closing swiftly upon it.  Good luck, poor fools.  This is where we must, as W says, become silent.  To babble here is fruitless--in all meanings of the word.